Scout's home from school. A snow day. So that I can get some work done before we get going on the snow angels, I put her in front of her old favorite, The Wizard of Oz.

She just came upstairs crying. Why?

"I want to be Dorothy," she said, a tear rolling down her cheek. "I'll never be Dorothy."

That's all I was trying to say on that recent Hump Day.

Could a musician do this with a corporate speech?

Working a parody video exploring this idea .....

A colleague of mine is writing an article about writing and delivering effective speeches. It's for a Rotary International publication, and so he's looking for one or two Rotarian speechwriters to quote. Anybody? Contact me and I'll put you in touch with the writer: dmurrayil@earthlink.net

All of which reminds me that it was H.L. Mencken who said, "The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist, Jack."

My father-in-law is an engineer, and he likes to chuckle at my technical bumbling. I laugh along good-naturedly.

Just as I did when the accountants at Ragan, when I was editorial director there, used to chuckle at the cursory way I'd look over the financial reports. (Hey, I understood what was happening generally, just not quarterly.)

Just as I do when my pal Paul catches my eyes glazing over as he explains his complex and stultifying "Home Underdogs" theory of betting hockey games.

I don't care if you laugh at me for being a writer guy who focuses on emotions more than appointments, who follows the gist of the plot rather than its millions of intricacies.

But those—especially those communicators—who assume that since Barack Obama is a fine communicator, he must be an incompetent lightweight who shouldn't be put in charge of anything ... well, that sticks in my craw.

Hat tip to Ron Shewchuk for getting me pissed off real early on this Super Tuesday.

I consider myself a pretty careful, pretty courteous expresser of my ideas and emotions. And if other people don't think I'm careful, they should see what I really think!

Actually, there have been a few episodes in my life—I can count them on two hands, and I often do—when I did say what I really thought, after heroic attempts to withhold it.

In each case I did not know that I was going to say what I said until I was halfway through saying it. In none of these cases did I ever regret having said it. Usually, it's quite the opposite.

The most memorable of these cases—and I'm about to ask you to share your favorite "I heard myself blurt out" moment—came during an endless meeting of about a dozen Ragan executives during which a long-gone Ragan windbag marketing exec (we'll call her Nancy) was going on and on and on and on (and so on) about nothing in particular, which was her habit. She was filibustering, to avoid making a decision.

I was just visiting Ragan offices, making my usual smiley freelancer rounds, and I popped into the meeting at someone's casual invitation. Twenty minutes later, I was seething at Nancy's blathering, and at what I saw as the dysfunctional acceptance of Ragan executives, including the normally impatient Mark Ragan, who appeared to be silently and placidly contemplating refinancing his house.

"Nancy!" I heard myself bellowing—really, I knew I was saying it but I had not made a decision to say it—"shut the fuck up!"

A heartbeat's pause, and then the whole room goes up for grabs with laughter. I thought Mark was going to have a heart attack. As for Nancy, she seemed mostly unperturbed; she just grunted, and (fair enough) told me to shut the fuck up. And she never seemed to hold the moment against me.

But during every Ragan office visit after that for months after what became known as the "shut the fuck up" meeting, Raganites who had been in that meeting or those who had heard about it, gave me little appreciative winks in the hallway.

Somebody had to say it. Even if nobody, including me, could ever quite muster the courage to decide to say it. It had to be said. And I feel that, in this instance, and in several others like it, all of which I hold dear, God spoke through me.

Can anybody relate to these involuntary outbursts? Do yours turn out as well as mine have (so far)?

It wasn't until very recently that I learned that my late mother once advised presidential candidate George Romney on his speeches, when she worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency in Detroit—for my father, the creative director—in the 1960s.

Before Romney self-destructed on a remark about having been brainwashed by military people on Vietnam, the head of Campbell Ewald adveritising agency prevailed on my dad, and my dad prevailed on my mom, to help George with his speeches—their writing and their delivery.

My dad remembers that she was a little "rough" on the important former chairman of American Motors Corp., delivering advice in her not-so-diplomatic style—her general philosophy of diplomacy was, "fuck them if they can't take a joke"—and making everyone at the agency a little nervous.

How did she like the experience? "How do you think she liked working for a Republican?" said my dad, the Republican who pressed her into service.

So I think it's a little odd that today, when George's son Mitt suspended his campaign for president, Carol Murray's son has a video on the Web advising Romney and the other candidates how they could do a better job of connecting with Americans.

Maybe the next generations of Romneys will listen to the next generation of Murrays and President Romney, a Democrat, and her inspirational speechwriter Scout Carol Murray will be remembered for great leadership and great communication .....

I'm reading the new book Jacked Up, by Jack Welch's speechwriter Bill Lane.

The book is at once full of communication wisdom and unbelievably obnoxious on all levels—I'll have a review next week on Ragan.com—but this leaped out at me. He's talking about some of the G.E. executives, who got rich during Welch's tenure. Rich, and complacent:

"The irony is that the enormous wealth being accumulated by fifty-ish senior people by the surging stock left some of them looking wistfully out the window and longing for Florida."

This doesn't seem to be an "irony" at all. It seems to be an obvious fact. Who, once they've made a few, or more than a few million dollars, would be content to waste the rest of their lives in corporate meetings?

Only those desperate freaks, I'd argue, who feed their souls on the thin gruel of making their quarterly earnings. Or those poor goofs who don't have the imagination to know that there is anything else to do with their lives.

I'm sure I'm overlooking something with the above statement. I hope you'll tell me what.

Was in a low-down rotten mood Saturday afternoon. Went to get an oil change. Efficient oil-change clerk, a woman who I've come to admire over the years, says, "Give me 25 minutes, okay?"

I go to the book store around the corner, figuring to spend the 25 minutes moodily perusing the covers to see if anything jerks me out of my gloom.

Against Happiness, by a gloomy Wake Forest English prof named Eric Wilson leaps off the shelf at me like no book ever leaped off the shelf at me before.

I'm in Flounder's Bar with a pint of Goose Island beer and 22 minutes to read the first few delicious pages.

"I for one am afraid that our American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. ... We might think we're leading a truly honest existence, one attuned to vivid realities and blooded hearts, when we're really just behaving as predictably an artificially as robots ...."

I walked back into the Jiffy Lube with a jiffy lube of my own and in happy—yes, happy—anticipation of reading the rest of the yellow-covered book this weekend.

Of course, Sunday's reading session in front of the PGA golf tournament told the rest of the story: The book blows; it's a grumpy liberal rant whose main point was pretty much made by the end of the introduction. The book didn't even bother to make the most obvious point. So now I still must write my own essay (which I, too might expand into a book!) titled, "The Tyranny of Happiness: How Acting Happy Keeps Other People On their Heels and Off Your Back."

Anyway, that's happiness for you: You're smiling at the Jiffy Lube one day, frowning at Pebble Beach the next.

I know everybody's about up to here with my Barack Obama-loving self here lately—it's a sad truth that people in love are usually the most obnoxious—but this election so far offers a huge lesson in leadership communication.

It's FDR's notion that a leader is a dealer in hope, and as far as this lesson goes, Obama is winning the way Ronald "Shining City on a Hill" Reagan won once, and McCain—well, shall we say, he has something to learn.

Dig this.

(Thanks to Ragan writer Michael Sebastian for the steer.)

Two hundred and fifty of my best friends, rhetorically speaking, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.

An annual three-day yakathon so wall-to-wall that there's almost no chance I'll blog from there. For the seriously speechwriterly, we'll be posting written and video coverage of the conference every day, tomorrow thru Monday, at Ragan.com.

Back at you here next week ....

I'm back from the Speechwriters Conference, and too tired from last week and too busy this week to offer elaborate commentary beyond what's running today on Ragan.com.

But to explain the overall effect this conference had on me, I can do no better than to share the e-mail that I sent late Friday afternoon to Ragan's genius conference organizer Cristin Clifford and the rest of the crew that we had in D.C.

I told them that for me "the conference is an annual reminder that we do more than just make hot air and money with all our writing and conferences. We really help people deal, and they really appreciate it."

Lest you think such smarmy sentiment is all I feel, I also enjoy the conference because my emcee role gets me as close as ever to Frank Sinatra.

As conference attender and Shades regular Vincent Rhodes put so suavely in a comment to my last post, "Even with drink in hand, David is a driving force at the conference."

Oh, pshaw.

Anyway: I'd love to hear from peeps who attended the conference—what were your favorite parts? And: Did I remind you, too, of the Chairman of the Board?

Ragan managing editor Morgan Snouffer tips me to a story on PerezHilton.com, about similarities between Barack Obama's speech over the weekend about words, and a 2006 speech by Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.

Check out the passages side by side:

Is this a case of plagiarism?

Or is it just a really obvious point, an easy layup that anyone accused of being "all words" would have made pretty much in the same way?

The March issue of Harper's has excerpts from a diary of "The Experiences of a Very Unimportant Officer," a Scottish Captain, Alexander Stewart.

Stewart's November 9, 1916 entry contains a good warning for employee communication people. Captain Stewart is muddy, wet, blistered and itching in a hole he's dug in the side of a trench:

"I am very much annoyed by the memos sent from Headquarters. They come in at all hours of the day and night and stop me from getting a full night's rest. Some of them are very silly and unnecessary. When I am just getting off to sleep with cold feet, in comes an orderly asking how many pairs of socks my company had a week ago. I reply, 14 1/2. Back comes a memo: Please explain at once how you came to be deficient one sock. I reply, Man lost his leg."

Let's make sure our internal communications are achieving something more than bothering today's mighty warriors about last week's sock count.

At Ragan we feel we're having a kind of Renaissance—a frantic Renaissance that teeters on the edge of a budgetary crisis—as we gradually transform our basic product from dusty, musty monthly newsletters to sprightly, daily, interactive articles on Ragan.com.

But it's paying off, if not yet in massive riches, in a feeling of immediacy (write the article today, see it appear tomorrow morning, watch comments gather throughout the day) and in the sheer fun of innovation. The young sons of a friend think it's unbelievable that "Uncle Murr" has a TV show! So does Uncle Murr.

And it's paying off in comments we hear from our readers. "You've really upgraded your offerings," people say.

That's nice to hear—especially in a world, and in a U.S. economy where it seems nobody is upgrading their offerings.

At the grand old Mayflower Hotel last week—where my grandfather once stayed, when it was brand new, in the 1920s—I looked forward to requesting my first wake-up call, cozy in my memory that, with your wake-up call they always asked you if you wanted free coffee or tea delivered at that hour, and whether you wanted the USA Today or the Washington Post.

"Seven thirty, coffee, and the Post," I always answered, with a special emphasis on "the Post", to let the hotel employee know she wasn't dealing with a total Midwestern clodhopper.

But this year? No free coffee, no Washington Post option. And, insult of all insults, an automated wake-up call system that requires me to punch in the time I'd like to wake up.

It's good to be part of something that's changing, rather than something that's just hanging on.

Sam Zell is the new CEO of the Chicago Tribune and the financially troubled company that owns it. He's intense, and has been criticized for his macho, obscenity-rich communication style.

And in response to Zell's defense of his style, some employees seem to be clapping, and otherse seem to be squirming.

Communicators, what are you doing?

To spare you, regular Shades of Gray correspondent and Jane Greer and I have been having a dialog off-line—the grownup version of a fight behind the school—about Barack Obama: whether he deserves all the love he's getting, or whether his followers are as dumb as they are hopeful.

It's not just Jane who's asking, essentially, "Where's the beef?" about Obama, wanting to know, beyond all the great speeches, what sort of change does he actually represent, what does he actually give us reason to hope for? It's all the speechwriters wanted to talk about at our conference in Washington, it's all my liberal friends are asking each other in the bar.

Here—and these may be added to or subtracted from as the campaign unfolds—are the reasons I gave Jane for my support for Obama, after I acknowledged that Obama's platform is built on mostly conventional liberal ideas:

• He is a tremendous writer and speaker, so he can compellingly get his ideas across domestically, and diplomatically get America's ideas across internationally. (At least he can do this publicly; I have no idea how persuasive he is person-to-person in legislative hallways or in one-on-one meetings.)

• Yes, "unity" is bullshit—Americans have honest and important disagreements—but Obama got his start on the national political scene by expressing his interest in focusing on the copious common ground that does exist between red-staters and blue-staters. As opposed the Bush administration's m.o. of finding just the right place, between 51% and 49%, to hammer in a wedge. As a communicator, as an American, I have to be encouraged by Obama's approach. (McCain and Clinton are both far better than Bush and Rove on this score; in fact, McCain may have as much uniting to do as Obama.)

• He seems the most emotionally solid (aside from Huckabee, actually) of the candidates. He really comes across as easy with people. Which usually means a person is easy with himself. (As opposed to McCain, who sometimes seems easy with himself and other times seems to be bursting at the seams, as if someone shot a load of rage up his ass. And Hillary, who's got that freaky, noisy Gatlin Gun laugh.) All of us who work with other people know that emotional intelligence is often at least as important as any other factor in being effective. Obama seems most likely, to me, to reflect on what he is doing, to change his mind if he concludes that he is doing something dumb.

• He has managed to create a campaign fund mostly on small contributions from goofs like me—as opposed to giant gifts from corporations like Pfizer and Exxon—so I feel he's more likely to represent me (and not Pfizer) if he gets into office.

• He's worked as an organizer in the howling Chicago ghettos. Riding through these on the El train when I first move to Chicago at 23 from leafy, suburban Ohio—and reading Alex Kotlowitz's book There Are No Children Here—I decided that this shame was the worst shame and the most urgent problem America had. My wife teaches in the inner city, and so the economic and educational poverty issue in the inner city affects us day. We think Obama understands it more deeply and in more subtle detail than anyone else.

• Yes, goddamnit, he's multiracial and comes across as a citizen of the world and the least likely to project or betray an asinine and incorrect and counter productive America-Is-The-Center-of-the-World image that unnecessarily enraged citizens in other countries long before 9/11, long before terrorism became a threat. With India and China growing in economic and military power, we must begin to project a less my-way-or-highway foreign policy, because reality will project it for us.

That's it (unless I'm forgetting some). But hell! That's a lot! Isn't it?

I just stumbled (and broke my leg) on this paragraph in an Ad Age story about a restructuring at Procter & Gamble:

"Under the plan, most of P&G's brands will be limited to 'zero overhead growth' (or ZOG), where employment won't rise regardless of sales growth. The highest-priority businesses, such as China, Central and Eastern Europe, along with beauty care, will be limited to 'half overhead growth' (HOG), where overhead costs can rise no more than half as fast as sales. The lowest-priority businesses, including an unspecified number of brands P&G will look to divest, will aim for 'negative overhead growth' (NOG), in which employment and other overhead costs decline as a share of sales."

Wow. I'm in a lot of pain.

My friend and longtime correspondent Wilma Mathews worked at AT&T for many years. During a dark period in the early 1990s, she was known in AT&T circles as the "Angel of Death," because the company was closing plants and it was her job to go to each one and put the elaborate, top secret plant-closure communication plan together. As a cub reporter at Ragan, I profiled Wilma in 1992, and when I asked her how this kind of work affected her emotionally, she said she often spent weekends after a plant closure curling up with her best friend, Jack Daniels.

It was then that I got the notion that AT&T was a place where interesting communicators could work. (And lots of them; someone will correct me if I'm wrong but at one time I think I remember hearing that AT&T had 750 PR types on the payroll.)

Anyway, Wilma sent me a note last week telling me that one of those AT&T communication characters is gone. Former AT&T speechwriter Carl Kelly died suddenly of a heart attack on Feb. 18, at 64.

Kelly wrote speeches “for every major CEO of AT&T and Lucent Technologies over three decades, and taught writing to hundreds of other professionals in this close knit public relations community,” according to the obit in the Newark Star-Ledger. “His wit, humor and clarity of thought marked both his well-known speeches and his dealing with his colleagues.”

From a string of e-mailed tributes from his colleagues, we learn that Kelly was also fast, accurate—and colorful. Former Kelly colleague and Bruce Brackett is now a freelancer. He tries to write to music but finds he can’t, and every time he turns the music off, he thinks of Carl Kelly “in his illegally smoke-filled office in our speechwriting group at Basking Ridge, banging away at his computer while wearing a set of headphones with a Def Leppard tape cranked up to the max. Needless to say he was producing wonderful stuff, all too often under ridiculous pressure.”

Carl Kelly, RIP: We’ll take it from here.

It's up there with the bitterest complaints I hear from speechwriters: My CEO won't rehearse.

In his new book Jacked Up, former Jack Welch speechwriter Bill Lane implores speakers to "Clear from your mind the illusion that it is 'cool' or impressive to simply stand up and 'wing' a presentation, or 'throw up' a couple of PowerPoint slides and bullshit your way through them. ... Allow your audience to see how much you value their attention and how much time you have invested in your [speech] to them."

And if Jack Welch's speechwriter's word isn't enough, here's the hottest speaker since the invention of stereo, quoted in today's Washington Post about his success in speaking (the rest of the article, which includes an analysis of Obama's stump speech, is worth reading):

"My general attitude is practice, practice, practice." In 2004, he told biographer David Mendell, "I was just getting more experienced and seeing what is working and what isn't, when I am going too long and when it is going flat. Besides campaigning, I have always said that one of the best places for me to learn public speaking was actually teaching—standing in a room full of 30 or 40 kids and keeping them engaged, interested and challenged."

Speaking coach Virgil Scudder once gave me a retort to CEOs who tell you you've got 15 minutes to improve their speaking ability: "You don't tell your golf pro that."

How do you get your speaker to focus on the job at hand?

Look, it's so easy to accuse a communicator of hypocrisy. No one can take advantage of even a fraction of the communication opportunities that crop up every day. Just trying, you'd go insane. Similarly, not every exchange in the course of one's day will be executed with optimal candor and power—or anything like it. Any critic, and surely any self-critic, may follow around any communicator and find, during the course of any day, a lot to second-guess.

But there are moments—as a parent, as a spouse, as a friend—when communicators blow communications in ways that constitute hypocrisy to the point of hilariousness.

I've recently taken over the management of a small but urgent plumbing project in the condo building where I live. The dude is coming in an hour, actually, to do a job that will involve shutting down the water in our seven-unit building for two hours. I am the only person in the building who knows this. I think I'm the only person in the building who's home today. But I have no way of knowing that for sure.

But I haven't sent out an e-mail to everybody warning them that the water is going to be off. Why? I haven't had friggin' time to send an e-mail or deal with any backtalk I get, because I've got to: a.) deal with the plumber himself. b.) finish a magazine story I'm working on. c.) blog, about communications!

I'm laughing as I write this. I am not merely a hypocrite, but I am, as Charles Dickens described Uriah Heap, I think it was, "a cathedral of hypocrisy."

Readers, can you match this?

Chicago documentary TV producer Tom Weinberg has a Web site called MediaBurn.org, a great and searchable hodgepodge of video clips, perhaps the weirdest (and, for speechwriters and other behind-the-scenes-ers, the most familiar)—is this one showing Richard Nixon hamming it up before his televised resignation in 1974.

It probably started a long time ago, but I noticed it after 9/11, when Americans girded ourselves for our role in homeland defense and President Bush told us all to go shopping and take vacations.

It continued when all the politicians on both sides of the aisle kept promising to make us "safe" from terrorists and other hostile forces, as if "safe" were an absolute term, not a relative one.

It continues when politicians, especially Democrats, tell, stump-speech stories of meeting struggling workers begging them for help with their upside-down mortgages. (Not that the government shouldn't help; but the politicians shouldn't portray their constituents as a bunch of helpless babies.)

And today, I blow my top reading in the Chicago Tribune that the governor of Illinois wants to spend $40 million to tear down the building where five students were killed earlier this month as the result of another maniac shooter.

An NIU junior quoted in another article agreed with the move.

"I don't really understand how you'd expect students, even five years from now, to actually walk into [Cole Hall] and take a class. To tear it down is probably a smart thing to do and to just start fresh."

Here's how you expect students, five years or five weeks from now, to actually walk into Cole Hall and take a class: You say, "Your physics class is in Cole Hall."

I went to Kent State. Seeing the massive M-16 bullet hole in the thick metal sculpture near the architecture building, down the hill from where the soldiers were firing into the crowd of protesters—this made an impression on me, much greater impression than the memorial they erected on the 20th anniversary of the May 4, 1970 shooting.

We keep babies from knowing about bad things, we tell babies everything is going to be all right no matter what, we tell babies we'll keep them safe.

As adults, as Americans, we know better. Let's act like it.

Dear Engagement Consultant,

I know you're frustrated when my eyes glaze over every time you start talking about "employee engagement." I'm sorry. I feel bad. I know I should be interested. For crissakes, I'm a journalist covering employee communication!

It's just that, this "engagement" business is so much more complicated than your little system seems to acknowledge.

To understand what I mean, please contemplate, as I have, how you would measure, how you would try to affect the "engagement level" of this totally burned out, worn out, cynical, sad, yet entirely effective guy who worked at Marshall Field's department store in Chicago until 1975.

Looking forward to talking with you,

David Murray